Thursday 13 December 2018, 7.30pm
Please note this month's SOLO:DUO:TRIO show is in Cafe OTO not the OTO Project Space.
SOLO:DUO:TRIO is a monthly night of improvised performances bringing together a wide variety of musicians and artists. Each show features a solo, a duo, and a trio performance where performers are invited to present something new or play with a person they haven’t played with before in an intimate and open environment.
SOLO: Stephen Cornford
DUO: Mandhira de Saram & Charlotte Keeffe
TRIO: Mark Wastell, Sholto Dobie & Luigi Marino
Stephen Cornford is an installation artist and experimental musician who works by reconfiguring consumer electronics. In 2015 he is touring a new performance which ab/uses four CRT televisions in a system in which sound produces image and vice versa.
Recent solo shows include Rumpsti Pumsti (Berlin), Lydgalleriet (Bergen) & Campbell Works (London). Stephen’s work has been included in international group exhibitions at ICC, Tokyo; ZKM Centre for Media & Art, Karlsruhe;Signum Foundation, Venice and Haus der Elektronische Künste, Basel. He is also artistic director of Oxford's Audiograft Festival and co-curates the Consumer Waste label.
http://www.scrawn.co.uk/
https://soundcloud.com/stephen-cornford
https://vimeo.com/user2227019/videos
Mandhira is happiest bringing her playful energy and creativity to a breadth of projects across the less trodden paths of contemporary music, working with the likes of Anna Meredith, Elaine Mitchener, Elliot Galvin, Laura Jurd and Shabaka Hutchings, and now increasingly as a solo artist.
Having left the Ligeti Quartet (Songbooks Vol. 1, 2021 and Nuc, 2023) - the plucky band of musical buccaneers who explore the outer reaches of chamber repertoire - Mandhira’s recent creative ventures include commissions by the Ligeti Quartet, a collaboration with the cross-cultural Australian Art Orchestra (debuting in Melbourne and HCMF) and working with Jasmin Kent Rodgman on the soundtrack to the feature film Bawa’s Garden. She has also been commissioned by the Barbican’s Sound Unbound Festival and Musicity.
Equally at home leading orchestras in the world’s most prestigious concert venues, recording film soundtracks at Abbey Road and improvising at Café Oto, her other projects include improvising duos with Steve Beresford and Benoit Delbecq (Spinneret, 2019) and regular appearances with Riot Ensemble and London Contemporary Orchestra.
She currently plays a 1735 Sanctus Seraphin violin kindly loaned to her by Derek Clements-Croome.
Keeffe’s debut album ‘Right Here, Right Now’ is where you’ll find her exhibiting a passion for vibrant soundscapes rendered in live spaces. Released in 2021, also on Discus Music, she earned critical acclaim carving out a niche on the imprint. She also composes and performs for a number of the roster’s artists, including; Hi Res Heart, Carla Diratz and Julie Tippetts. She also co-leads Anthropology Band with the head of Discus Music, Martin Archer.
To date, her music has been featured significantly on BBC Radio 3, Jazz FM and BBC Radio 6, where she's been described as a 'prolific', 'dynamic' and 'excellent improviser!', by the likes of Corey Mwamba, Stuart Maconie and Jez Nelson. Keeffe is a Serious Artist and part of Serious’ Take Five 2022 cohort. She performed a duet with the mighty City of London as part of world-renowned trumpeter Dave Douglas' Festival of New Trumpet Music 2022.
Harnessing the power of art for social change is a crucial part of Keeffe’s musical identity: she has served as Assistant Musical Director of the London Gay Big Band, champions gender and diversity equality, as part of the Parliamentary award-winning Women in Jazz Media team, and played in Marin Alsop's Taki Concordia Orchestra at the World Economic Forum 2019, in front of world leaders and celebrities including Sir David Attenborough.
From stepping on Glastonbury and Wilderness stages alongside Charlotte Church, Laura Mvula and Kate Nash, to broadcasting to an international audience live from her bathroom during the pandemic, Keeffe understands that embracing individuality and letting go of inhibitions is the surest way to grasp the transformative power of music.
“Keeffe shows notable strength of character as she runs the sonic and emotional gamut..." - Kevin Le Gendre, JAZZWISE
Mark Wastell is a versatile improvising musician who has played a central role in the British improvised music scene for over a quarter of a century. He has performed and recorded extensively and his varied resume includes projects with Derek Bailey, Phil Durrant, John Butcher, Lasse Marhaug, Rhodri Davies, Simon H. Fell, Burkhard Beins, John Tilbury, Mattin, Mark Sanders, Tony Conrad, Evan Parker, Tim Barnes, Bernhard Günter, Keith Rowe, John Zorn, Peter Kowald, Joachim Nordwall, Otomo Yoshihide, Paul Dunmall, David Toop, Alan Wilkinson, Max Eastley, Hugh Davies, Julie Tippetts, Alan Skidmore, Mike Cooper, Chris Abrahams, Stewart Lee, Clive Bell, Arild Andersen, Jan Bang, Maggie Nicols, Thurston Moore and David Sylvian.
Sholto Dobie was born in Edinburgh and lives in Vilnius. He uses loose structures and an array of sound-sources including home-made organs and hurdy gurdy. His performances are personal and intuitive, often coming across as delicate, evocative, and absurd.
He has recorded and performed with artists and musicians including Rie Nakajima, Judith Hamann, Lia Mazzari, Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, Mark Harwood, Marja Ahti & Niko Mahti Ahti, Antonina Nowacka, Malvern Brume, Lucia Nimcova and in the group Lo Escucho Lo Pinto.
He has released solo and collaborative music with labels such as Mappa, All Night Flight, Kashual Plastik, Infant Tree, Takuroku, Penultimate Press and Thanet Tape Centre and has toured widely, presenting performances at Cafe Oto (London), Fylkingen (Stockholm), KM28 (Berlin), Himera Festival (Turku), Kraak Festival (Antwerp), Organ Sound Art Festival (Copenhagen), Les Atelier Claus (Brussels), C3 (Milan), Jauna Muzika Festival (Vilnius), Braille Satellite (Lithuania), Counterflows Festival (Glasgow) and Glasgow International.
Luigi Marino is a musician based in Bristol. His work focuses on networks able to display relationships between human and nonhuman actors, with particular attention to how intuitive decisions can profoundly affect pre-existing conditions. He is an active improvisor performing on both electronic media and percussion, especially zarb and bowed custom cymbals.
He holds an MFA in electronic music from Mills College where he worked as teaching assistant for John Bischoff and Chris Brown, and a joint PhD in composition from University of Birmingham and De Montfort University funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His teachers include Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, James Fei, William Winant. He studied zarb with Mohssen Kasirossafar.
As a performer or composer his music has been presented at festivals and venues such as Rainforest World Music Festival (Kuching, Malaysia), San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Cafe Oto (London), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Rome), Intonal Festival (Malmö), Auditorium Parco Della Musica (Rome), IEM (Graz), Seoul International Computer Music Festival, BEAST FEaST (Birmingham), Acousmatic for the People (Malmö), Sacred Realism (Berlin), Interpenetration (Graz), Sowieso (Berlin), Rhiz (Vienna), Iklectik (London), Hundred Years Gallery (London), Km28 (Berlin), Offene Ohren (Munich), WIM (Zurich), ImprovvisaMente (Lodi), ICMC (Athens).
